Then she started to cry, her body shaking, the tears flowing like rain. I held her, tried to do what I could to calm her down, but it was no good. I admit I felt a little guilty thinking that the stress of the kidnapping was finally coming out. I pulled her close feeling the warm smoothness of the leather corset against my skin. She started to mumble something and as I listened I gradually came to realise that this had nothing to do with the kidnapping or with me.

I understand grief through bitter experience. It is a slow subtle poison. If you try to bury it or run from it then the loneliness and pain get a power over your life and they start to eat away at your soul.

I loved my grandfather, he had been a strong generous man always willing to help a neighbor or a grandson prone to trouble. In our community he had held a special place, never elected to any office, never qualified in any profession yet somehow always the one people turned to in times of crisis. He was if anything the perfect human being, a strong man who didn't pick on the weak, a proud man always willing to admit when he was wrong. During the long hot Indiana summers of my boyhood we had walked and talked and fished, all the things boys and grandfathers are supposed to do together.

Then in my senior year at High School he died, no illness, no warning just one day I came home from school and found my mother crying in the kitchen. The shock and the grief hit her all at once and she was never quite the same again. As for me? Well one of the constants in my life was missing and the pain was worse than anything my young mind could imagine. Then I did a foolish thing. My parents had always treated me as an adult and I was graduating High School at the age of fifteen. So I tricked myself into thinking that I was an adult and bottled the grief inside so as not to upset my mother any further. I played the dutiful son and buried my feelings so deep that when it was all over and I wanted to cry I found I couldn't. That feeling stayed bottled up eating away at my guts every day for eight long years. Then late one night as I lay alone in a hotel room in San Francisco all that burst to the surface and I cried all night.

I don't know what had happened after Josh died but I know that Caroline hadn't dealt with it. She'd buried that grief as I had and it had lurked in the back of her mind. Now it had picked it's time and place finding that moment of weakness as it had in that dark hotel room in San Francisco. I held her shaking body encouraged her to scream into the privacy of the soundproofed room and waited for the storm to pass. She spoke a little between the sobs and with some gentle encouragement I persuaded her to tell me their story.

She had known Josh Petersson all her life. The Petersson's were a local farming family who had lived in this backwoods part of Iowa since great grandfather Olof came from Scandinavia in the eighteen nineties. They lived close enough to the Reverend Conway and his family to be considered neighbors. They shared barbecues in the summer, exchanged gifts in the winter, attended the good Reverend's church and involved themselves in local fund raising. Josh was three years older than Caroline and had voted himself the title of honorary big brother. She had grown up with him always about but never really saw him as anything but a friend.

Then when she was fourteen he had asked her out on a date. It seemed to have come without warning and I got the feeling that she had accepted almost by reflex. Almost accidentally she had fallen into the relationship, then deliberately she fell in love. Knowing that her father would not approve, she had kept their romance a secret. Over that summer they had seen each other more and more, meeting in private, lying to friends trying to keep the truth away from the tell tales and gossips common to all small towns. As she was underage they had agreed to limit themselves to oral sex and heavy petting until her sixteenth birthday. For six months they had done what kids do and I think these were the happiest weeks of her young life.

Then Josh started to busy himself on some project. He was unavailable most weekends and would not tell her why. She became jealous, and started to think he had another girl. When she finally confronted him he'd just laughed and asked her to meet him at a small empty cottage on his father's land. His family called it "Patrick's House" and his grandfather had built it for his parents when they were first married. She had been there before of course, it was one of the few places were they had any privacy. This time she went with some trepidation thinking that perhaps he wanted to break up. Instead he surprised her with an engagement ring on a silver chain she could wear it around her neck and a promise of marriage. Then they walked through the empty rooms looking at the work he'd done to make it their home and planned their new life together.

It had started to rain so they couldn't leave immediately. The moment had seemed so perfect that she took him by the hand and led him upstairs and they made love for the first time one week before her fifteenth birthday.

It took a lot of coaxing to get her to tell me about his death. I knew from experience that it was necessary, that if she didn't get it in the open it would continue to haunt her. It was painful and she cried like a child as she went through his last day. They'd had a fight, he'd wanted to formally ask her father. She had said no. Angry words were said then he'd stormed off. He'd apparently gone hunting, something he did quiet often when he needed to think, when he didn't return this family sent out search parties. They had found him at the bottom of a dirt bank in a lonely wood. She told me how he had slipped and fell shooting himself in the process then bleed to death unable to climb out again. At that moment she broke down completely, it took another hour before she was cried out. I held her until the end encouraging her to let it go providing the physical comfort a person needs at that time. When she finished she was weak and emotionally drained.

I took off the posture collar and replaced it with the usual one. I had intended to remove the corset and boots but right now she needed to sleep. I attached the wire and freed her hands. Then I gently dried her face and brushed her hair aside.

"Thank you," She said. "What for?" "For listening." I smiled. "Comes with the territory, " I said, "If you can't talk to your master who can you talk to?" I pantomimed looking around the room for some other person and discovering only myself there. She smiled, and I knew she was going to be all right. I turned to leave but at the door on impulse I stopped and looked back.

"Who are you?" I asked gently.

"A slave for your pleasure, Master."

I looked into her large blue eyes. Tomorrow when she'd had chance to recover it may be different but at that one vulnerable moment I think she really believed what she was saying, at that moment she really was my slave.

Vote for this story:

Please rate this story:

You need to log in to be able to post a message.